Relatable! Exploring Difference & Relationality in Creative Writing Studies (CFP)

Proposal Deadline: September 5th, 2025

Conference Dates: November 7th & 8th, 2025

The Creative Writing Studies Organization is now accepting proposals for our online fall conference, to be held the weekend of November 7, 2025. In holding our conference virtually in alternating years, we hope to continue building Creative Writing Studies scholarship across borders and time zones while maintaining the felt benefits of in-person gatherings. This year, the CWSC seeks proposals that help us expand and refine our understandings of relationality. 

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Call for Proposals: Relatable!

In Poetics of Relation, postcolonial philosopher and author Édouard Glissant writes that “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Readers, writers, and academics do not work in a vacuum; we’re in dialogue with texts, people, politics, institutions, industries, and conversations that inform our work and educations. We’re all part of multiple systems of relationality. Yet difference often stands in the way of understanding. When the word “relatable” really means “relevant to me,” as it often does in the classroom, anything outside the purview of “relatability” looks like it’s not worth examining. We are working to see beyond the faulty goal of “relatability” in creative writing studies; so, what more expansive visions of relationality and shared knowledge can we articulate? 

The CWSO seeks proposals exploring, redefining, and troubling the notions of relatability. We invite presenters to explore theories, histories, pedagogies, applications, and practices that critique existing paradigms of relatability and reorient us toward the complexity of difference in shaping our relations with readers, students, and other communities.

Proposals might engage with ideas such as:

* Radical Kinship & Belonging: How do we create inclusive classroom communities? In what ways does creative writing build empathy and enhance relationships between humans across space, lived experiences, and time?

* Algorithmic Predictability: If a piece of writing generated by a large language model is relatable to its data-training set, how do human writers reimagine relatability? What is “relatable” in creative writing? (When? How? To whom?)

* Craft: In what ways can creative work embody expansive relationality through hybrid genres, digital spaces, or nontraditional process or publishing?

* (Inter)Disciplinarity: What kinds of relationships can we envision building between creative writing and other disciplines? What relations are formed in creative writing and creative writing scholarship?

In a divisive world where barriers feel harder and harder to overcome, where the value of empathy is called into question, and where creative production is outsourced to non-human tools, creative writing can be a way for people to reach out and build bridges. In this conference, we will explore how relating to one another by generating connections across difference – connections beyond mere relatability – is more important than ever. We consider the power of community in the face of division, the recentering of the human in the face of tech, and what new forms of community we might need moving forward.

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Session Format: Individual Paper, Panel, Workshop, or Roundtable

All sessions in our online conference will be 60 minutes in length, with the final 15 minutes reserved for Q & A.

Individual Paper (15-minute presentation): Individuals submit papers that will be presented in a thematic panel determined by CWSO. An extra 15 minutes are allotted at the end of each session for Q&A. 

Panel (3+ individual papers thematically linked): Moderators propose panels and recruit panelists, and then guide panel participants through presentations and Q&A, not to exceed 60 minutes.

Workshop (60-minute hands-on session): Workshops are 60-minute sessions where participants will be actively involved in doing or making something related to creative writing, such as classroom activities or how to use tools or techniques. At the end of a workshop, participants should walk away with some kind of deliverable. Workshops must be grounded in sound pedagogical theory and evidence-based practice; CWSO is not interested in lore-based writing prompts (even if they’re really good ones!) unless they connect to one of the conference tracks in an explicit way, for example using digital tools, engaging with social action, or addressing issues of diversity and inclusion.

NEW THIS YEAR: Roundtable (3+ participants in discussion for 1 hour): Moderators propose roundtables and recruit participants to give brief, informal presentations on one topic (5-10 minutes each), followed by conversation and debate among presenters and attendees.

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Tracks

Submissions that address the conference theme may also match one of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies tracks: pedagogy and education; history; qualitative and quantitative research; the digital and multimodal; professionalization and labor; theory, craft, and culture; and social action. As a note, tracks align the call for papers with the journal so that participants can adapt their conference papers to be submitted to our peer-reviewed publication. However, we also welcome proposals that fall outside of these categories or envision new tracks. For the track descriptions and more information about the journal, please check out the JCWS submissions page: https://repository.rit.edu/jcws/aimsandscope.html 

We expect proposals will consider how race, ethnicity, ability, culture, class, language, and gender/sexuality difference are experienced and studied in the creative writing academic arena. Instead of existing as a separate conference track, diversity, equity, and inclusion undergirds our thinking about each track.

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Notes on Submissions:

Submissions should demonstrate an understanding of previous scholarship on the subject under investigation or offer a rationale based on empirical evidence in order to create new knowledge and/or challenge disciplinary conceptions and practices. Submissions based solely on the author’s own experience may be appropriate if they are the result of well-defined action research and use established research methods. It is expected that research involving human subjects will conform to the highest standards of ethical conduct as outlined by the Institutional Review Board of the scholar’s home university. 

The CWSO is dedicated to democratizing scholarly communities -- including this conference. As we aim to disrupt the typical conference review process, we commit to offering mentorship and support to any proposals that do not yet fit the scholarly requirements of the conference. In line with our ideals of inclusivity and community mentorship, we may be in contact with proposers as needed to work together to ensure the submission is ready for the conference.

For all accepted proposals, we ask that presenters and moderators submit accessibility materials (session outline, power point, or notes) by Thursday, November 6th.

If you have questions, please reach out to CWSO chair Audrey Heffers at AudreyHeffers [at] gmail.com.

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Completing Your Proposal:

In order to complete the CFP you will need:

- Paper or session track and format

- Paper or session title

- Names and email addresses of all participants

- An abstract or description of the paper or session that does not exceed 300 words 

- A one or two sentence summary of the paper or session, 50 words maximum

- Citations that support the proposal’s description and connect to current conversations in the field. We recognize that conversations in the field happen in many places and that citations may come from a variety of non-hegemonic sources. We join Sara Ahmed in encouraging the sources “who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism, including work that has been too quickly...cast aside or left behind, work that lays out other paths, paths we can call desire lines, created by not following the official paths laid out by disciplines.” (Living a Feminist Life)

Submit here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEV5MoTsNB_KKUaPP-2yjHdc4fQrsN...